managing editor Philip Bennett

Philip Bennett joined FRONTLINE in May 2011 in the newly created position of managing editor. With Executive Producer David Fanning and Series Senior Producer Raney Aronson-Rath, he oversees the editorial mission for FRONTLINE, including working with journalists to produce original stories, reviewing reporting for FRONTLINE programming and managing collaborations with the series' journalism partners.

During almost 30 years in journalism, Bennett has been an editor of international and national security coverage, a local news reporter and a foreign correspondent. Between 2005-2009, he was managing editor of The Washington Post. During his tenure as the paper's second-ranking editor, The Post won ten Pulitzer prizes. Earlier, Bennett led The Post's award-winning international coverage, supervising two dozen foreign correspondents and reporting projects on subjects from the Mexico justice system and AIDS treatment in Africa to international migration and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bennett is currently the Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University, where he teaches about national security secrecy and the news media, about coverage of Islam and about narrative journalism in the digital age. At FRONTLINE, Bennett is part of efforts by the senior editorial team to create new publishing models for deep investigative stories in the public interest.

Bennett's first newspaper job was at The Lima Times in Peru, where he became the paper's editor. He was hired as a local news reporter by The Boston Globe in 1984, and wrote about race and immigration. As the paper's Latin American correspondent between 1986-1990 he covered wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, the U.S. invasion of Panama, and events in Mexico, Cuba and Brazil. Bennett was later The Globe's foreign editor. He has written about Latin America in magazines including the Atlantic and Vanity Fair, and has been a special correspondent for the Spanish newspaper El País.

A native of San Francisco, Bennett graduated from Harvard College in 1981 with a degree in history.